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Tuesday, January 10, 2012

The Art of the Steal: Albert C. Barnes Art Collection

Albert Coombs Barnes (January 2, 1872 – July 24, 1951) was an American chemist and art collector. Barnes was known as an eccentric figure who had a passion for educating the underprivileged. He created a special relationship with Lincoln University, a historically black college in the area, and gave the university a strong role in administration of his foundation.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer "Did Alfred Barnes Close Or Open Doors To Art? He Always Was Open To Blacks," published on 30 September 1988 by Carl Burrowes: No mortal could have planned such an exquisite revenge. Not even Albert Barnes, portrayed by so many as an evil genius.

Ever the iconoclast, Barnes has managed to jolt genteel Philadelphia even after death, this time by breaking a tradition that funnels endowments only to institutions that are already heavily endowed. If only some of his detractors would try to upstage him now.

Barnes' $1 billion indenture to Lincoln University, staggering as it is in

financial terms, is richer still in symbolism. This treasure trove of Western cultural artifacts comes, as fate would have it, while the college is headed by a black female anthropologist!

Barnes's collection grew to house 69 Cézannes—more than in all the museums in Paris—as well as 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos, and an astonishing 181 Renoirs. The 2,500 items in the collection include major works by (among others) Rousseau, Modiggliani, Soutine, Seurat, Degas, and van Gogh. The entire collection is estimated today to be worth between $20 and $30 billion.[1] Although John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were vastly wealthier than Albert Barnes, the Barnes Foundation has assets 10 to 20 times greater than either the Carnegie Corporation or the Rockefeller Corporation.

Barnes' Main Line critics, in their smugness, may imagine it as another nose thumb at them. To his friends in other places, this merely caps a lifelong commitment to the disadvantaged. One could say Barnes regularly afflicted the comfortable because he consistently comforted the afflicted.

Barnes first announced plans to turn his foundation into a center for black education in 1927. In those days of Jim Crow, this gesture of generosity to one part of the community was perceived as a "threat" by others. Even now, many fail to see the connection between that promise and its fulfillment 61 years later.

Barnes' ties to the black community went well beyond attending black spiritual concerts as a poor boy in Kensington. Lincoln students have had access to the rich collection of the foundation almost from the day the doors first opened.

Throughout the 1920s, Barnes regularly contributed to the National Urban League - money as well as articles to Opportunity, the League's monthly. A special 1929 issue of the magazine, devoted to African-American visual arts, carried contributions from four foundation staffers.

Barnes' enthusiasm for black art was reportedly fueled by his close friend, Paul Guillame, a French gallery owner and early student of African art. One of the foundation's first publications was Guillame's Primitive Negro Sculpture in 1926.

Barnes would publish his research on black art in a series of speeches and papers. One article, entitled "Negro Art and America," appeared in The New Negro, edited by fellow Philadelphian Alain Locke.

That anthology ignited the cultural flowering that came to be known as the ''Negro Renaissance." In it Barnes argued that African-Americans, through poetry and music, were "revealing to the rest of the world, the essential oneness of all human beings."

When the renaissance story is fully told, Barnes' impact may prove more important than the more celebrated New York dilettantes. The list of foundation alumni includes Russell T. Gordon, Humbert Howard, Raymond Sanders and John Brantley Wilder, a virtual "Who's Who" of black Philadelphia artists.

To African- Americans, Barnes offered neither a "civilizing" influence nor philanthropy at a distance. His was a friendship rooted in knowledge and respect. He would as readily treat visitors from Paris to the singing of a black children's choir as he would expose black youths to the cultural gems of Paris.

This respect was regularly reciprocated, as in 1943 when the Pyramid Club, a leading black social center, honored Barnes at its third annual art exhibition. This was an audience for whom his message had always carried a non-threatening, life-affirming resonance. Among the major exhibitors were some of his students from 10 years earlier.

In his lifetime, Barnes saw his early estimation of the European Impressionists win wide acceptance. So too his theories of art appreciation derived from philosopher John Dewey. With Lincoln's assumption of control over his foundation, he presses forward another cause: Perhaps the once underprivileged will now be treated with a little more dignity by those in the art world he once derided as "reactionary stuffed shirts". (source: Philadelphia Inquirer, 1988)

Runaway Slave Gordon. From the Smithsonian Photography Initiativ e, "Photography changes the way we record and respond to social...

Capoeira

African Martial Arts of Brazil

About the Banjo by Tony Thomas

The banjo is a product of Africa. Africans transported to the Caribbean and Latin America were reported playing banjos in the 17th and 18th centuries, before any banjo was reported in the Americas. Africans in the US were the predominant players of this instrument until the 1840s.

Charleston Slave Tags and Slave Badges

Badge laws existed in several Southern cities, urban centers such as Mobile and New Orleans, Savannah and Norfolk; the practice of hiring out slaves was common in both the rural and urban South. But the only city known to have implemented a rigid and formal regulatory system is Charleston.

MANILLA: MONEY OF THE SLAVE TRADE

Manilla. Manillas were brass bracelet-shaped objects used by Europeans in trade with West Africa, from about the 16th century to the 1930s. They were made in Europe, perhaps based on an African original.Once Bristol entered the African trade, manillas were made locally for export to West Africa.

SLAVE CURRENCY: African Slave Trade Beads

In Africa, trade beads were used in West Africa by Europeans who got them from Venice, Holland, and Bohemia. They used millions of beads to trade with Africans for slaves, services, and goods such as palm oil, gold, and ivory. The trade with Africans was so vital that some of the beads were made specifically for Africans.

Slave Trade Currency: Cowry Shells

Long before our era the cowry shell was known as an instrument of payment and a symbol of wealth and power. This monetary usage continued until the 20th century. If we look a bit closer into these shells it is absolutely not astonishing that varieties as the cypraea moneta or cypraea annulus were beloved means of payments and eventually became in some cases huge competitors of metal currencies.

Bunce Island Slave Factory

Cannons with the Royal Crest

Adanggaman

Africans Making Slaves of Africans

Ota Benga The Man in the Bronx Zoo

Ota Benga (1883-1916) was an African Congolese Pygmy, who was put on display in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo in New York in1906

Railroads and Slave Labor

North America's four major rail networks — Norfolk Southern, CSX, Union Pacific and Canadian National — all own lines that were built and operated with slave labor.

Sculptor Augusta Savage

"Lift every voice and sing" by Augusta Savage: New York World's Fair.

Afro-Uruguay Spirit of Resistance in Candombe

In the streets of Montevideo, Uruguay, Afro-Uruguayans celebrate an often-ignored part of their history - Candombe and resistance.

Tintin: Sinister Racist Propaganda

Tintin has been an inspiration for generations. But his status as a paragon of wholesome adventure is under threat, thanks to a court bid to ban one of his books, Tintin in the Congo, for its racist portrayal of Africans.

W.E.B. DuBois

"It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." -- W.E.B. DuBois

Slave Tortures

Portugal Slave Trade

1501-1866 Portugal transported 5,848,265 people from Africa to the Americas.

French Slave Trade

1501-1866 France transported 1,381,404 Africans to America.

Great Britain Slave Trade

1501-1866 The British transported 3,259,440 Africans to the Americas.

Spain Slave Trade

1501-1866 Spain transported 1,061,524 Africans to the Americas

Denmark Slave Trade

1501-1866 Denmark transported 111,041 people from Africa.

United States Slave Trade

1501-1866 The USA transported 305,326 Africans to the Americas.

Netherlands Slave Trade

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?" — Marcus Tullius Cicero